Exposed
by ja54591
Summary: An accident aboard an abandoned ship leaves Ezra poisoned by high levels of radiation. Unable to provide aid, the Ghost crew race against time to get him to Atollon before he succumbs to his injuries.


**Based on prompt from swrrequests on Tumblr.**

A deep groaning resonated through the empty corridors of the _Looking Glass_ , as the superstructure of the desolate freighter strained to support its own weight. The only lights in the ship beamed out from two flashlights, long streams of white light broken by the clouds of dust perpetually suspended in the air. The footsteps of the visitors echoed through the empty halls, mixing with the low moans of the stricken vessel, sending a chill down Ezra's spine.

"Looks like we're late to the party," Ezra muttered, his attempt at humor unable to conceal the unease in his voice. Ahead, Sabine's resolute stride betrayed no such insecurities.

"Only by about thirty years or so," she quipped back. "The crew jumped ship with its cargo shortly after leaving Bespin a couple of years after the Republic began taxing the trade routes. Rumor has it they made off with a couple billion credits worth of Tibanna Gas. Authorities and bounty hunters only found half the crew, the gas and the ship were never recovered."

"Until now," Ezra replied, looking around the drab, industrial hallway. "They could have left the heat on," he complained, exhaling a cloud of fog into the beam of his flashlight for emphasis.

"We're lucky we have gravity and air," Sabine snorted, keying her comlink as they descended down a flight of stairs. "Spectre 1, Spectre 5. We're almost to engineering now. How's the bridge?" A muffled crash sounded through the device.

"Oh, just _swimmingly_ " Kanan groaned. "If Zeb can keep from breaking the ship, we should have the ship's logs up in a second, along with some good electronic scrap." A muffled _not my fault!_ in the background earned a snicker from the teens. "Keep heading towa… neering… look… power cells…" Static overwhelmed Kanan's voice, shortly before the connection went dead entirely.

"Strange, this ship isn't that big…" Sabine remarked.

"Well, that's not our only problem," Ezra replied, gesturing down the hall in front of them. The coridor ended abruptly, a blast door standing between them and the prizes that awaited beyond. Ezra keyed the controls, but the buttons clicked idly. "We're going to need to give it some juice. Give me a second." He knelt next to the wall, removed a small panel, and began fiddling with the wiring.

As he worked, Sabine's comlink crackled again with static, choking out broken fragments of distorted language.

"Spec… 1… out… ring… core… melt… away…" The Mandalorian stared at the comlink, trying to decipher what she just heard. Though severely distorted, Kanan's voice had sounded urgent, almost like a warning.

"I'm going to head back up and try to get comms, I think something's gone wrong on the bridge," Sabine remarked, turning towards the staircase.

"Got it!" Ezra exclaimed, as the blast doors rumbled to life, straining their tired hydraulics to part ways.

Her back turned, Sabine didn't see the thick cloud that billowed out of the room. Ominous as the sight was, it was the tone sounding in her ear that caused her to freeze. Her helmet provided her with a wealth of information and warnings, and she had memorized the different tones that signified different statuses and alerts. Only one had the ability to make her blood run cold; a long, pitchy note unlike the others. A half-second later, red letters flashed in her vision.

 _CBRN AGENTS DETECTED_

"Ezra! RUN!" she screamed, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him up towards the stairs. CBRN: chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear threats. _A sure way to a slow death_. The filters in her helmet had already kicked into protective mode, making each breath she took feel like she was straining to pull air through a narrowing straw. Regardless, she cleared three flights of stairs with adrenaline-induced speed, only stopping when she was sure the cloud was no longer following. Placing his hands on his knees, Ezra coughed violently and spit, panting from exertion.

"You gotta warn me before these surprise workouts of yours," he rasped.

"Spectre 5! Come in! If you can hear me, get out of engineering! The core's melted down, the entire place is flooded with radioactive material!" Ezra straightened, staring at Sabine's comlink with wide eyes. Sabine took the transmitter, and brought it to her helmet with a shaky hand.

"Spectre 1, this is Spectre 5… we've been… exposed," she began with a slight tremble in her voice. "Running diagnostic now." She stared at the datapad on her gauntlet, cursing herself silently. _The comms were dead from radiation interference. I should have recognized that…_ Her thoughts were cut short by a beeping, and she allowed herself a sigh of relief as she read the results. "We're going to be fine, I'm detecting primarily alpha emitters." She looked down at her armor, now coated with a layer of fine powder. She laughed when she looked to Ezra; the poor boy looked like a ghost between the powder subduing the colors of his clothing and his pale face.

"So, we're good?" he asked hesitantly.

"Yeah, clothing is more than enough to stop alpha radiation. Of course, you might want to wash your face for once," Sabine jeered, giving him a gentle nudge.

"Spectre 5, this is Spectre 2," Hera's voice cut in, a tone of worry in her voice. "Alpha or not, I'm sending Chopper with the _Phantom_ to pick you two up separate from the others. I don't want to risk getting anything in the _Ghost_."

"Roger, Spectre 2. Moving there now." Sabine clipped the comlink to her belt and turned back to Ezra. "You good?"

"Yeah, just recovering from the sprint," he replied, a weak smile on his face.

Within minutes, the two heard the _thump_ of the _Phantom_ connecting with the airlock before them. The small port opened, and Sabine moved to board the shuttle. Ezra paused a few paces behind her.

"Hey… is the ship… drifting?" Ezra asked, his voice sounding unnaturally distant.

"Not noticeably, why do you…" Sabine turned, watching as Ezra placed his hand on the wall of the corridor, as if to steady himself.

"We're moving… really fast…" Ezra mumbled, leaning on the bulkhead.

"Ezra? What's wrong?" Sabine asked, as she moved quickly to his side. She put a hand to his shoulder, only to have him fall heavily into her arms. His head rolled back, staring into her visor as he tried to fight against the grip of vertigo.

"Guys! Ezra's down!" Sabine shouted into the comlink as she pulled him through the airlock. Her mind raced; she hadn't detected any other toxin, and alpha radiation is generally harmless even as caked in the material as they were.

Ezra's hand brushed against her helmet as she sat him upright in his seat. Sabine's stomach dropped.

 _Unless it gets inside the body_.

* * *

The _Ghost_ shuddered as the _Phantom_ slid into its docking port. Even before the clamps secured the shuttle to the ship, Kanan was already moving towards the airlock. Mighty purple arms enveloped him as Zeb held him back.

"Get the _kriff_ off of me!" Kanan shouted, anger and fear palpable in his voice.

"You can't, mate! You'll contaminate the entire ship!" Kanan wanted to tear his way from the embrace, but he knew the Lasat was right. Opening the airlock would send whatever material the teens had encountered into the ventilation system, spreading it to every corner of the vessel. As Kanan quit struggling, Zeb slowly let go, watching the Jedi stare towards the closed door in anguish. Already, poisonous fear was seeping into the bond Kanan shared with Ezra, a looming dread punctuated with growing pain. Ezra's signature normally felt like a raging fire of energy; beyond the door, Kanan could sense only but a flicker of light

"Kanan! In here!" Hera's voice called from the common room. Kanan and Zeb sprinted back through the hall, gathering around the blue image of Ezra projecting up from the Dejarik table. A pair of ghostly hands held a canteen and a rag, slowly wiping some substance from his face.

"We got caught in a cloud of the stuff," Sabine continued through the camera mounted to her helmet, her voice shakier than Kanan could ever recall hearing it. "My helmet filtered it for me but…" The hands dropped a bit, then resumed their work. "I don't know how much he inhaled."

"I've already alerted Atollon. They'll have decontamination and medical teams standing by when we arrive." Even in a crisis, Hera managed to exude calm. Kanan turned to her, away from the range of the table's microphone.

"Atollon? That's nearly five hours from here!" Kanan exclaimed in a forced whisper.

"It's the only option we have" Hera replied sternly. "I don't have the resources to do anything here."

The hologram phased out of focus as Ezra's form lurched forward, the disembodied hands catching him. The sound of violent retching put Kanan's stomach into a knot. After a few brutal moments, the hands helped Ezra upright again, a new rag wiping away fluid from his mouth. Hera shook her head, pulling out a small notebook.

 _1845 - Vomiting begins._

* * *

Sabine raised the canteen to Ezra's lips, helping him rinse some of the bile and acid from his mouth. She watched carefully as he swished the water in his mouth, then weakly spit into the drip pan Sabine had managed to find shortly after his first bout of vomiting. His mouth empty, Ezra leaned back against the wall of the _Phantom_ , closing his eyes and murmuring softly. Delirium set in quickly once the vomiting started. At one point, he had started calling for his mother. He had turned to the hands that were attending to him, but the expectant look that grew across his face disintegrated into shock and horror as he looked up to Sabine's masked visage.

Sabine desperately wished she could remove the helmet, if only to give Ezra some small comfort as the poison in his body slowly tore his innards apart. Her armor, normally her greatest comfort, now felt like a barrier, an insurmountable wall separating her from her dying friend. Cold fingers of self-loathing were now beginning to grasp at her psyche as she cleared more of the crimson spittle that was beginning to come more frequently.

 _I saw the signs._

 _I should have seen this coming._

 _He shouldn't be suffering for my mistakes._

"Sabine?" Ezra croaked. Sabine immediately broke from her mental self-derision, kneeling in front of him.

"I'm right here, Ezra." She stared into his eyes, trying to hold back tears of her own.

"I'm scared."

No words came to her tongue; nothing seemed right to say. Instead, she moved beside him, removing her gloves and letting them fall to the floor. She pulled his head into her chest, running her fingers through his hair.

"I am too," she choked out, careful to drop the clumps of raven hair that had fallen away at her touch outside of his field of view.

* * *

Kanan stared through the glass of the observation deck into the operating theater. Ezra lay on a table at the center of the room, nearly unrecognizable from the number of tubes and lines connecting his body to the machines around him. A surgical droid ambled around a bank of monitors, stopping to face the figures watching his work.

"Patient's estimated absorbed dose from ingested radiological agents, seven-hundred fifty to one-thousand five-hundred Roentgen equivalent man," the droid announced in a dull, droning tone. Kanan saw Sabine noticeably pale. "Severe internal hemorrhaging of larynx, stomach, gastrointestinal tract, lungs. Prognosis: guarded, with immediate application of subdermal bacta." A flutter of hope rose in Kanan's stomach. It ended as the droid continued.

"Irrevocable damage to lung tissue, thyroid, kidneys, and bone marrow. _Liberator_ maintains ability to synthesize first two. Kidney, bone marrow unable to be synthesized with assets on hand. Donor required. Prognosis without donor organ: hopeless." Kanan reeled, overcome by his own emotions and the unending waves of pain that saturated his bond with Ezra. Hera extended a hand to steady him, and turned to the droid.

"Can anyone on the base donate?" The droid held her gaze absently.

"Querying medical records requires command approval."

"Approved. Authenticate, _Juliet-Sierra_." Commander Sato stepped forward, hands clasped behind his back.

"Querying Atollon database. Ninety-five records found. Eliminating incompatible species, sixty-two records found." The droid lapsed into silence, mirrored by the absolute stillness in the observation room. "At ninety-percent projected chance of compatibility, zero records found." Kanan clutched Hera's hand, desperate for reassurance. "Widening parameters to seventy-five percent compatibility. Zero records found." Zeb clenched his jaw, placing a gentle paw on Sabine's shoulder. The girl's eyes remained locked on the motionless body beyond the glass. "Widening search to fifty-percent chance." The droid paused.

"Sixty-five percent chance compatibility, one record found."

* * *

The first thing Ezra sensed was pain. Soreness seemed to radiate from every inch of his body, as if an Imperial walker had stepped on him as he lay on the ground. Slowly, he realized he wasn't laying on the ground; it was too soft to be the ground, soft and warm. Without the strength to open his eyes, Ezra focused on the gentle transitions of light and dark that illuminated the backs of his eyelids. Shadows and whispers seemed to dance around in front of him, undefined and unintelligible.

Something was in his hand. It was firm, clasping his palm. Sensation began to return, allowing Ezra to gently stroke the object. It felt rubbery, but familiar at the same time. Curiosity beginning to overcome in his semi-conscious mind, Ezra summoned his strength to open his eyes. A hand, covered in blue latex, held his own.

"Welcome back," Kanan's gentle voice whispered from what seemed like a great distance. The haze began to recede, allowing him to shift his gaze in the voice's direction. The light of the room was blinding, but Kanan's teal eyes came into focus, peering over a white mask.

"Kanan? What's on your face?" Ezra weakly croaked. His throat burnt with every utterance. Kanan chuckled softly.

"It's just a precaution. Your immune system is very weak right now." Ezra struggled to comprehend Kanan's words; in his drug-induced state, words were only beginning to make sense.

"Is… is that a hair net?" A second laugh joined Kanan's, this time from Ezra's right. Sabine lay under a blanket on a bed next to his, the vibrant purple-to-aquamarine gradient of her hair contrasting with the powder blue of the hospital gown she wore.

"Always asking the important questions," Sabine teased in a soft voice. A smile crossed Kanan's face; the girl was finally returning to her old self. Ezra's eyes darted around the room, taking in the growing level of detail in his vision, before settling on the IV line hooked to his arm.

"Are we going to be all right?" he asked weakly.

"In time, yes." Kanan squeezed Ezra's hand, elated by the waves of calm that were beginning to cross their bond. Metallic footsteps approached as the dull tone of the medical droid's voice filled the room.

"Patients Bridger, Ezra and Wren, Sabine require continued rest. Recommend you allow them to do so," the droid announced with almost a curt tone. Kanan glared at the droid, but Sabine reached from her bed and grasped his shoulder.

"I've got him," she said with a gentle smile.

"You're starting to sound like Hera," Kanan prodded, getting a genuine smile in return. Kanan rose from the stool in between the two beds, and squeezed Ezra's hand one more time. Hera met him in the hall outside, wrapping him in a warm embrace. Through the door, Kanan could feel Ezra's signature rekindling, his energy illuminating the room once more.

 **Author's note: I actually had a draft of this planned for _Growing Insurgency_ , but decided it worked better as a standalone. I swear, the next chapter is coming... I just keep getting distracted by these darn plot bunnies. Forgive me, and as always, critique and commentary is welcome!**

 **All the best,**

 **JA**


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